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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of safety regulations. I hope you're not suggesting that improved safety features are the cause of increased fatalities.

Cell phone use while driving is also sharply up in the past decade. Two decades ago almost nobody had a smartphone. Now I can't drive 5 minutes to the store without seeing someone texting or using their phone.

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So maybe we should spend the money on preventing distracted driving rather than requiring expensive automobile features to try to compensate for it?

Sounds good. How?

Good question. DUI used to be thought of as sort of a funny thing. People would laugh about the drunk weaving around on the road. And the penalties (if nobody was hurt) weren't very severe. The limits were pretty high (as high as 0.15 BAC). Then we changed the messaging and the consequences and lowered the limits and most people today think it's a very uncool and stupid thing to do.

I'm not at all suggesting it's an easy problem to solve, but if that is the cause of the increase in fatalities, that is the problem we should be attacking.

Increased deaths of people walking getting hit by cars says everything about the effectiveness of recent safety regulations. They clearly are not working and we need to take a new approach beyond more surveillance and beeping.

This isn't rocket science. We could just, you know, do what the Netherlands does.

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